New Study Finds Kitchen Towels Can Give You Food Poisoning

If you've ever had food poisoning, you probably blamed it on something you ate that day. Maybe you even called up a restaurant and yelled at them. According to new research, there's an outside chance it was another culprit.

The American Society for Microbiology just presented a study that found it's very possible to get food poisoning from your kitchen towels.

Researchers looked at 100 towels after they'd been used for one month. Half of them had a potentially dangerous level of bacteria on them.

The odds were even higher depending on different factors. How many people used the towels and if they were used for drying hands and dishes increased the amount of bacteria present.

One way to lower your risk is to wash your hands longer, at least 20 seconds with hot water. That way there's not as much leftover bacteria when you dry them off on a towel. That means there's less bacteria to transfer to the towel.

The other obvious thing you can do is wash your kitchen towels more often.